Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: "Astronaut Abby" is at the controls of a social-media machine that is launching the 15-year-old from Minnesota to Kazakhstan this month for the liftoff of the International Space Station's next crew.

While researchers have known about the choral sounds for decades, the $686-million RBSP measures these sounds in higher resolution than any spacecraft that came before.

With better understanding of the data will come greater knowledge of space weather. Since solar storms can short out satellites and affect hydro grids (a famous example being the Quebec hydro grid in 1989), researchers are eager to predict the weather to minimize the effects.

RBSP is a small step toward those predictions, Kletzing said. The great strength of RBSP, he added, is the two satellites allow measurements on the extent of a space weather "event."

"Otherwise we don't know how broad the region is; it may be large or small. ... We can start to get the extent of the region mapped."

Emphasis on EMFISIS
The RBSP mission launched Aug. 30 and is still in a 60-day "commissioning phase" as the experiments and hardware are tested out.

The two spacecraft wander within the Van Allen radiation belts, orbiting anywhere from 311 miles to 19,417 miles (500 to 31,250 kilometers) above the Earth. One spacecraft laps the other in orbit about every 75 days.

The Kletzing team's experiment is called the Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS).

The experiment's sensors sit on the edge of two large booms, on either side of the spacecraft. When fully extended, each boom will extend about 10 feet (three meters) from the spacecraft.

EMFISIS needs to sit as far away as possible from the spacecraft to avoid recording interference from the other instruments and the spacecraft itself, Kletzing explained.

It was one of the first instruments turned on, partly to monitor and manage any spurious signals from the spacecraft.

A symphony of sound
The "chorus" sounds are only one of a suite of noises the EMFISIS team is listening for.

For example, EMFISIS can detect the boundary between areas dense with particles and areas with fewer particles.

It also measures waves associated with ion gyrations around magnetic fields. Hydrogen, helium and oxygen produce their own gyration frequencies, creating waves at frequencies below human hearing. Mapping out these particles would provide a clue about the composition of the magnetosphere.

"With space weather, we'd like to get to the stage of prediction, but that's a ways off," Kletzing says. "To understand how the physics actually work, you need to get a better model and understand that model."

RBSP's prime science mission is expected to run two years, which Kletzing calls a long time for spacecraft constantly bathed in radiation.

Most spacecraft avoid the Van Allen belts because of the need for extra shielding and special parts. "But we built ours to last," said Kletzing.

Collaborators on the EMFISIS experiment include the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of New Hampshire, the University of California at Los Angeles and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Southern stargazing

Stars, galaxies and nebulas dot the skies over the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, in a picture released on Jan. 7. This image also shows three of the four movable units that feed light into the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, the world's most advanced optical instrument. Combining to form one larger telescope, they are greater than the sum of their parts: They reveal details that would otherwise be visible only through a telescope as large as the distance between them.
(Y. Beletsky / ESO)
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A balloon's view

Cameras captured the Grandville High School RoboDawgs' balloon floating through Earth's upper atmosphere during its ascent on Dec. 28, 2013. The Grandville RoboDawgs’ first winter balloon launch reached an estimated altitude of 130,000 feet, or about 25 miles, according to coaches Mike Evele and Doug Hepfer. It skyrocketed past the team’s previous 100,000-feet record set in June. The RoboDawgs started with just one robotics team in 1998, but they've grown to support more than 30 teams at public schools in Grandville, Mich.
(Kyle Moroney / AP)
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Spacemen at work

Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov, right, and Sergey Ryazanskiy perform maintenance on the International Space Station on Jan. 27. During the six-hour, eight-minute spacewalk, Kotov and Ryazanskiy completed the installation of a pair of high-fidelity cameras that experienced connectivity issues during a Dec. 27 spacewalk. The cosmonauts also retrieved scientific gear outside the station's Russian segment.
(NASA)
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Special delivery

The International Space Station's Canadian-built robotic arm moves toward Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus autonomous cargo craft as it approaches the station for a Jan. 12 delivery. The mountains below are the southwestern Alps.
(NASA)
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Accidental art

A piece of art? A time-lapse photo? A flickering light show? At first glance, this image looks nothing like the images we're used to seeing from the Hubble Space Telescope. But it's a genuine Hubble frame that was released on Jan. 27. Hubble's team suspects that the telescope's Fine Guidance System locked onto a bad guide star, potentially a double star or binary. This caused an error in the tracking system, resulting in a remarkable picture of brightly colored stellar streaks. The prominent red streaks are from stars in the globular cluster NGC 288.
(NASA / ESA)
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Supersonic test flight

A camera looking back over Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo's fuselage shows the rocket burn with a Mojave Desert vista in the background during a test flight of the rocket plane on Jan. 10. Cameras were mounted on the exterior of SpaceShipTwo as well as its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, to monitor the rocket engine's performance. The test was aimed at setting the stage for honest-to-goodness flights into outer space later this year, and eventual commercial space tours.

Red lagoon

The VLT Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile captured this richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula, released on Jan. 22. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of 11 public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes.
(ESO/VPHAS team)
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Fire on the mountain

This image provided by NASA shows a satellite view of smoke from the Colby Fire, taken by the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft as it passed over Southern California on Jan. 16. The fire burned more than 1,863 acres and forced the evacuation of 3,700 people.
(NASA via AP)
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Where stars are born

An image captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. This false-color infrared view, released on Jan. 15, spans about 40 light-years across the region. The brightest portion of the nebula is centered on Orion's young, massive, hot stars, known as the Trapezium Cluster. But Spitzer also can detect stars still in the process of formation, seen here in red hues.
(NASA / JPL-Caltech)
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A long, long time ago...

This long-exposure picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, released Jan. 8, is the deepest image ever made of any cluster of galaxies. The cluster known as Abell 2744 appears in the foreground. It contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago. Abell 2744 acts as a gravitational lens to warp space, brightening and magnifying images of nearly 3,000 distant background galaxies. The more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
(NASA / NASA via AFP - Getty Images)
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Frosty halo

Sun dogs are bright spots that appear in the sky around the sun when light is refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere. These sun dogs appeared on Jan. 5 amid brutally cold temperatures along Highway 83, north of Bismarck, N.D. The temperature was about 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, with a 50-below-zero wind chill.